We are racing towards a radical new digital future in the fast lane. What about our values? Which will fall by the wayside, which new values will we need to live and shape this rapid change with confidence? “A future in love with technology but without values is worthless,“ Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, General Director of the MAK as well as initiator and head of the Vienna Biennale, puts the curatorial positing of the third edition of the first multidisciplinary biennale worldwide in a nutshell. Taking an intercreative, pluralist perspective on fine art, design, and architecture, the Vienna Biennale for Change 2019: BRAVE NEW VIRTUES. Shaping Our Digital World will start a debate on values for the digital age. Thun-Hohenstein: “If you visit the Vienna Biennale For Change 2019, you will take home valuable perspectives and personal empowerment regarding the digital future.”

The organizers of the Vienna Biennale—MAK, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Kunsthalle Wien, Architekturzentrum Wien, and Vienna Business Agency, as well as Slovak Design Center as Associate Partner and AIT Austrian Institute of Technology as non-university research partner—will explore meaningful and actually applicable values for Digital Modernity in several locations.

Vienna Biennale

The Vienna Biennale is the first event of its kind to combine art, design, and architecture, with the aim of generating creative ideas and artistic projects to help improve the world. Its category-spanning, interdisciplinary approach and combination of artistic ambition and the creative economy open up new perspectives on central topics of our time and thus promote positive change in our society. The Vienna Biennale was established with the understanding that we are living in a new modernity in which the digital revolution penetrates all areas of our life and is thus fundamentally changing our civilization. Today's Digital Modernity offers considerable potentials for lasting improvements in quality of life as well as innovative living concepts and business models in every sector.

The Vienna Biennale is an initiative of the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art. It is organized by the MAK, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Architekturzentrum Wien, and the Vienna Business Agency, and with support from the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology as a non-university research partner.

Vienna as a Location for Experimentation

This new biennale in Vienna was established with the recognition that Vienna was one of the centers of the previous era of Western Modernity around 1900, from which significant impulses emerged whose effects in some cases continue to be felt to this day. Thus, Vienna can be seen as an authentic, credible location for the search for new paths to positive change. By following in this extraordinary tradition of experimentation, the Vienna Biennale aims to find answers to today's most important issues and utilize the potentials of the creative revolution in order to offer people new insights for crucial areas of life.

The Vienna Biennale was born of the conviction that Vienna is the right place to develop a new, coherent, and unique biennale. The focus will be on people, who need one thing above all in times of radical change: orientation!